Writings News and Delta Ponds

 The big news this week is that my short story, "A Summoner's Tale," is on-line at the On The Premises site:  https://onthepremises.com/issues/issue-34/issue-34-place1/  I'm glad this story found a home.

Sunday, Mark and I went for a walk in Delta Ponds.  I brought along my camera and managed to catch a few photographs of turtles, cormorants, nutria, and white egrets.  Mark actually likes nutria -- I always thought they were a kind of large, furry water rat -- and we learned that they have an attractive undercoat underneath their disheveled overcoat.

OK.  I guess they do have cute little paws.



The white egrets were the most difficult to photograph. 


The one we first saw was across the ponds, and the only way to not get a shaky shot at that distance is to use a tripod or at least rest agains a signpost or fence. 

We lucked out in that the egrets flew much nearer, and I was able to get some more close-up photographs.   I had been fiddling with the manual settings, but I realized that I was much more likely to get a passable photograph if I let the camera do things on automatic.

One egret flew up into a near-by tree, and for once my camera was able to focus on the bird and not the branches (or leaves) in front of it.